bfniii

post-prediction wrap up? ezekiel lays it out in 26:1.



what was founded upon the island? not the land itself, but the kingdom/nation/city-state/whatever you want to call it. that is what ezekiel's overall message is about. btw, the island wasn't the extent of the political boundary. that's what ezekiel calls the daughter villages.

dongiovanni1976x

Bfniii, Ezekiel informs us in chapter 26:1 that it is the He then makes his prediction that Nebuchadnezzar will do this and that and that the Tyrian’s will be slaughtered and their city destroyed etc.
In chapter 29:17 Ezekiel informs us that it is the And at this later date is when he tells us that, Although I predicted that Nebuchadnezzar would plunder Tyre’s riches (26:12), So I what I was suggesting to Johnny was that I think this is sufficient evidence to assume a proper date (by proper I mean that it was made BEFORE the events they describe) for the prophecy.


The city, Tyre, was founded upon an island.

Ezekiel never said “your political boundary’s walls will be destroyed,” or that God will cause the sea to cover Tyre’s “political boundary” or that Tyre’s political boundary will be sought for but never found again.
The "daughter-villages" would be those cities and towns that were under Tyrian hegemony, such as Ushu for example.

The Tyre prophecy failed by Ezekiel’s own admission, but don’t let this one little mistake keep you from putting your faith in Jesus. Shit happens.

bfniii

here you make my point. while ezekiel's overall message is concerning the nation and people of tyre, he outlines some specifics regarding tyre's fate. furthermore, this response doesn't address the points that i made regarding the "you" in verses 8-12.



the ones that outline my points. how convenient.



when you say the next verse are you referring to verse 13 or verse 15? i included verse 13 in my previous response. that verse does not refer to physical destruction. furthermore, verse 15 and beyond does not refer to physical destruction like 4 - 11 does. i have addressed 19 and 20 in several other responses.



i am not ignoring any switches. i have addressed what they refer to.



no, they all address that subject. the streets.



exactly my point. streets.



in order for you to maintain your fishbowl existence that denies the possibility of anyone having different interpretations than you



i will continue to maintain that the context of the passage refers to the mainland until you can come up with irrefutible textual evidence that ezekiel is referring to something else. so far you have merely presented your opinion.



source?



it seems that you are now playing the game that the mainland was not referred to as tyre. ezekiel specifically calls the daughter villages a part of tyre so those semantics are falsified. therefore, ezekiel does include them as tyre's. additionally, you haven't shown that verses 8 - 12 refer to anything other than the mainland.



you can't understand that not everyone interprets the passage the way you do (with good reason). therefore, God is not necessarily a trickster.



i see no reason why the interpretation i have supported isn't straightforward. i have supported it at length from history, the original language, the context and precedent. straightforward is a subjective term. i doubt you will ever admit that.



still defending your position by attacking another. i guess you thought you could distract me.



i disagree. as i said, i have addressed the ramifications of his account.



the prophecy doesn't have to mention alexander by name to include him.



yes, i do. it is still true that the nation of tyre has not existed since alexander's time. i am asking you why you think otherwise.



funny. i will return to my point. i provided a source regarding the plagues and you apparently are not aware of it's contents. therefore, it is not possible that your knowledge exceeds anyone else's who is familiar with that source, it is merely different. furthermore, you show yourself to be recalcitrant regarding the issue by not studying the issue. perhaps you could explain how this does not reduce your credibility.



i stated my case regarding that issue. there was no dodge. i can cite the posts, as usual.



at this time it is a theory, no matter how parsimonious or exemplary it is.



only in your fishbowl existence.



one includes the supernatural and the other is constrained by methodological naturalism. clearly, they have different goals.



i have already made my case. i'm sorry we disagree.

Johnny Skeptic

Unless you can accurately date the prophecy, which you obviously can't, Nebuchadnezzar and other nations are irrelvant. Are you dating the prophecy solely by faith without any secular historical references? If so, then we need to debate Biblical inerrancy, not the particulars of the Tyre prophecy.

bfniii

if you study the history of rome, you know that the demise of the empire did not occur in a short time frame but over a long period of time. this does not appear to be the case with tyre. it appears from history that people fled the mainland during nebuchadnezzar's campaign for the island citadel. then alexander finished them off. at that point, the people of tyre were either killed or dispersed to such a degree that the collective ceased to exist but in a very short time period. in this way, rome is not analogous. rome was attacked multiple times, but there was not a time when all of the romans were killed or dispersed completely.



like rome, the demise of jericho's strategic importance did not occur quickly. tyre's did.

i'm not saying that what happened to tyre has never happened to another city, but i'm not sure it's accurate to say that it is common either.

dongiovanni1976x

Alaric sacked Rome in 410 and it limped on another 66 years but it was pretty much finished by then. You are acting as if the 250 years between Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander was a drop in the bucket.

Bfniii, we both agree that Alexander the Great was never specified in the prophecy. And I assume we agree, that if something is not specified then it is unspecific. Therefore if you want to use Alexander in support of your argument then you must acknowledge that Ezekiel’s prophecy is not incredibly specific and detailed, but rather unspecific.

In addition, due to the length of time necessary for Alexander to “fulfill your theory”, you stifle the prophecy’s strength. This is because in history it is the exception, rather than the rule, that a city will never be attacked, lose prominence or suffer other difficulties; and what makes this prophecy significant is that it was supposedly made during the height of Tyre’s prominence. Therefore, for this reason you are rendering Ezekiel’s prophecy insignificant.

Pile on top of these two points is the fact that Tyre still stands to this day, which renders the prophecy unfulfilled. But you want to contend that the prophecy was not directed against Tyre, but against it’s kingdom, as an abstract entity with no locale. Thus the fact that Tyre exists and survived Alexander with a king of its own, means nothing to you because you think that the independent kingdom of Tyre ceased to exist. But this is not what the prophecy said because it specifically says that the city of Tyre would be covered by the sea and lost forever; therefore if you want to take this “abstract kingdom” interpretation we must change the prophecy from Ezekiel to Bfniii’s prophecy.

So what are we left with: CONTRARY TO WHAT BFNIII WOULD LIKE TO BELIEVE, EZEKIEL’S PROPHECY REGARDING TYRE IS EITHER UNSPECIFIC, INSIGNIFICANT AND NEVER FULFILLED –OR- IT IS UNSPECIFIC, INSIGNIFICANT AND SHOULD NOT BE CONSIDERED AN EZEKIEL ORIGINAL.

Nor was there such a time with Tyre. You think EVERYONE was killed by Alexander? He installed a king to rule over those that were still in the city...and the city was prosperous enough to be besieged by Alexadner's one eyed general, Antigonus, little more than a decade later!

Johnny Skeptic

But not nearly all of the Tyrians were killed or dispersed during their lifetimes. Many of them died with the satisfaction that God's supposed judgment against them was unsucessful, which in fact it was since many of them died natural deaths at the mainland settlement and at the island settlement. It could never take an all-powerful God centuries to get even with puny humans, and surely a loving God would not choose to get even with Tyrians who were born centuries after the prophecy was supposedly originally given.

What is your justification of God having innocent babies at Tyre killed?

Please reply to my post #614 about dating.

Jack the Bodiless

bfniii:
Have you forgotten that your "points" were refuted long, long ago on the "Biblical Errors" thread (post #163 IIRC)? But you are STILL missing the point. You have NO justification for your mangling of Ezekiel 26:8, which simply does not say what you want it to say.
Good grief, you can't even count! The very next verse after verse 13 is verse 14. A reminder for the arithmetically-challenged:
26:12 - Physical Destruction.
26:13 - Not Physical Destruction
26:14 - Physical Destruction
...Where you utterly failed to demonstrate that they don't refer to physical destruction. But the references to physical destruction extend beyond this, into the next chapter:
This is obviously far more than a change of political leadership!
Nope, not the streets OF TYRE that Nebby FAILED to reach.
Bfniii, does your language have no equivalent of the English word "ALL"?

Why can't you understand that EVEN IF the mainland is included as PART of Tyre, he STILL has to invade the ISLAND in order to include ALL of Tyre?

You are making the extraordinary, amazing, ludicrous claim that the ISLAND is NOT part of Tyre!

...And you're also slyly attempting to rewrite history by implying that Nebby succeded where he actually failed. Plenty of historical sources have been given, over several threads. It's time for you to re-read them.

...And verses 8-12 DO specifically apply to the ISLAND anyhow. You want "irrefutable textual evidence"? How about reading the Book of Ezekiel?
Now, I shall perform the textual analysis that you have REFUSED to perform for so long.
Note that it is impossible for Ezekiel's "Tyre" to include BOTH the island AND the mainland, for several reasons: this "Tyre" has daughter villages (i.e the mainland settlements are referred to as separate entities), Nebby is to make a "spoil of Tyre's riches" and even Ezekiel himself records that this failed (and history tells us why: Nebby failed to take the island), and this destruction is to occur "in the midst of the waters" (and note that it was Alexander, not Nebby, who pushed the rubble of Ushu into the sea to make a causeway: in Nebby's time, there was already a causeway, which the Tyrians later removed).

Most importantly, however, and disastrously for your argument: you require a shift to the mainland ONLY in order to exclude the island from ALL Tyre's streets:
You MUST change the subject completely AWAY from Tyre itself, the island: to EXCLUDE it.

But you CANNOT do this. The text does not ALLOW you to do this.

Therefore you lose.

No, you have never even attempted this.
Distract you from what? You've lost on ALL fronts, bfniii. I was merely reminding you of that.
It doesn't mention Alexander in ANY sense. Not by name, not by title, not by allegory, not even as "he". The ONLY two individuals that appear ANYWHERE in the "prophecy" are Nebby and God.

Exekiel knew absolutely nothing whatsoever about Alexander. Alex was entirely unforeseen.
Because what you say is doubly false. The nation of Tyre did NOT exist immediately PRIOR to Alexander's time (because it had already been absorbed into Persia), but it DID exist again a couple of centuries AFTER Alexander.

No kingdom --> Alexander ----> Kingdom.

Alexander, despite his military victory, accomplished precisely NOTHING WHATSOEVER that was remotely relevant to Ezekiel's "prophecy".
Again, why do you post falsehoods that can so easily be checked?

It's somewhat off-topic, but if you insist, I can give you a reference to every single post in which I used the phrase "Great Firmament Dodge" (and the relevant posts prior to when I started calling it that), and humiliate you utterly. I get the bizarre notion that you would enjoy this. Are you a masochist?
Evolution is a Fact and a Theory
Come outside YOUR fishbowl, into the E/C forum, and the sharks will feed on you.

My statement stands: Genesis IS a proven falsehood.
One (creationism) includes demonstrable falsehoods, whereas the other is constrained by adherence to the available facts.

noah

Bfnii, you haven't responded to my response to you which was a direct answer to your questioning Johnny's assertion that many cities and kingdoms fall and are never rebuilt to their former glory:
I then responded to you with specific examples of cities and kingdoms that have fallen and never regained their glory:

That should have answered your question.

But now you are moving the goal posts, giving me some long-winded extrapolation comparing the fall of Tyre with that of Rome. Who cares about any of this bfnii? You doubted publicly Johnny's assertion that cities and kingdom's fall and do not recover their former glory. I told you that this doubting of yours was baseless. The record shows that cities' and kingdoms' falling and never being rebuilt is common. Period. You can't argue with that. It's a fact.
So please don't try to change the subject and move the goal posts.
No more guessing at frequency or number of times this has happened.Never mind whether you think it is not a frequent occurrence.
Do you accept the facts that I have shown you here that Johnny was right?

Do you accept the fact that cities and kingdoms fall, lose their glory and never recover it?

Secondly, can you offer any evidence for your assertion that cities and kingdoms falling and never regaining their glory is a rather uncommon occurrence which is what you seem to be saying here:
Thirdly, even if it is uncommon, yet well documented, many times throughout history that cities and kingdoms fall and don't recover their glory, how can you say there was anything special about Ezekiel's so-called prophecy?

Johnny Skeptic

The personal appearance of a being claiming to be the God of the Bible who could prove that he could predict the future would be fine. A simpler solution would be some common sense historical data that reasonably prove dating. Got any?

In other words, your entire argument for that point is “the Bible says so,” right? Are you an inerrantist? In the past, you said that the Tyre prophecy can stand on its own merit without bringing up any other Scriptures. What did you mean by that claim?

No. I am neutral. Are you?

Let me put it this way, do you have any evidence that it is quite unusual for cities and kingdoms to not be rebuilt to their former glory?

Not sufficiently. Please tell us if you believe that it is quite unusual for people who live on or near water to spread their nets to dry. What is at all prophetic about such a claim?

Even if God can predict the future, that is not sufficient reason for people to accept him. All that it takes to predict the future is power, not good character. I submit that the God of the Bible does not have good character and should not be accepted.

Why do God’s judgments have to be right? Do you believe that might makes right?